Ms Fiona Coyle:

In regard to perinatal mental health services, while there have been welcome efforts to make our mental health services more inclusive to the needs of women and other marginalised groups, there is still a long way to go in terms of perinatal care. We still do not have a unit in the country where a mother who is experiencing mental health difficulties and needs inpatient care can go with her newborn child. That is something we need to look at, invest in and resource. At the moment it is a huge gap. It is back to staffing.

I reiterate what my colleague said about the workforce. We need to encourage a diverse workforce. Even as regards the specialised perinatal units and services, there needs to be encouragement to bring in a diverse range of skill sets from diverse backgrounds. At the end of 2021, Mental Health Reform and the Mental Health Commission launched guidelines on delivering mental health services to ethnic minority communities, and some of those guidelines are about how to encourage more diversity within the staffing. We had some concrete suggestions that, in staffing, there should be references to cultural responsiveness in position descriptions, performance reviews and promotions. There is therefore a way for us to look at this from a HR perspective to ensure we are encouraging.

We also did a project with the Cabra community mental health team whereby we developed a cultural sensitivity toolkit. One of the challenges that came up was that these staff were so personally motivated to engage and to learn and that openness was there that many of them did it on their own time because their day-to-day jobs are so busy and they are so stretched. Those individuals who undertake the training probably have an awareness and an openness and want to build on the skills they have. We need to ensure that, within a training context, this involves everyone. That unconscious bias piece is really important for a country such as Ireland as to where we have come from as a small island. We all need to look at our own unconscious biases. That is really important.